Writings>Books>Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11

In Power and Constraint, Jack Goldsmith challenges the conventional wisdom that 9/11 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. The novel powers that our post-9/11 commanders in chief have assumed have been met with legal and political constraints—enforced by Congress and its committees, government lawyers and auditors, courts, the media, NGOs – that have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable, and that preserve the framers’ idea of a balanced constitution despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary in the age of permanent war.